


Those Who Stand Beside the Throne

by scioscribe



Category: Black Panther (2018), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-11 03:48:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15306834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: In the aftermath of Thanos, everyone finds their own coping mechanism.  Okoye's is Val.





	Those Who Stand Beside the Throne

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



Shuri let the Asgardians stay.  “What does it matter?” she said.  “We lost half our people.  They lost half of theirs and then half more besides that.  You want to tell me there’s no room in Wakanda for actual aliens?  They might be colonizers, but they aren't in any shape to go colonizing us.  Their king looks like he can barely get himself out of bed in the morning.”

With her brother and mother dead, Shuri talked more quickly than ever, as if she had to outpace her grief, burn words one by one for fuel so she could keep pushing herself forward.  The child queen of Wakanda, the proof of her right to hold the throne less her bloodline and more that she’d genetically engineered the heart-shaped herb back to life again and reseeded the palace gardens.  Always moving, always working.  There were shadows beneath her eyes.

Okoye did not tell her to rest or slow down.  They all had their own ways of coping.

“I don’t think they’ll stay forever,” she said.  “They’ll want to find their way to a country where they still get called gods.”

“So would I,” Shuri said.  Her old pretty smile, all enthusiasm, had turned hard and manic.  “There, then, a temporary refuge.  Even M’Baku can live with that.”

It wouldn’t have been Okoye’s duty, in days gone by, to go and speak to the refugees, but it was absurd to say that Shuri was not safe in the palace with the rest of the Dora Milaje—what was left of them—crowded around her.

And she had her own coping mechanism.  The Valkyrie.

Okoye met up with her on the edge of the Asgardian encampment.  It had become something of a small village, forged from shipping containers and canvas and wood: unsightly but durable enough so far.  Valkyrie sat by a campfire on the outskirts.  She always seemed to distance herself from her people when she wanted a drink, and Okoye saw the bottle beside her gleaming in the firelight.

“What’s the word?” Val said.

“The queen says you may all stay as long as you need to.”

“A generous girl.  Was that your advice to her?”

“No.  I told her I wasn’t sure you were all trustworthy.”

“All?  Try none.  Or one, I suppose.  Thor, when he’s in his right mind.”

“And when will he be that again?”

“I don’t know,” Val said.  “When I saw everyone I loved dead and I failed to kill the one I blamed for it, it took me a few thousand years, but I don’t know, he’s young, maybe he’ll come around sooner.”  Her voice was flint-hard, a spearpoint she seemed willing to thrust against Okoye’s throat if necessary.  “Give him time.”

That loyalty.  For Okoye it was like looking into a mirror, if you wanted to fuck a mirror.

She said, “You love him.”  She trusted Valkyrie would understand how she meant the word.

“Not so much.  He made me start to care again, and now everything hurts like hell, all the time.  But there you go.”

A cool wind swept over them and Okoye tucked herself up closer to the fire.  “What did you do when you didn’t care?”

“I drank.”

“You drink now.”

“I said I cared now,” Valkyrie said.  “I didn’t say I was good at it.”

But she was.  That this village stood at all was proof of that—it had been Valkyrie who had overseen half the construction, Valkyrie who had bargained for supplies, Valkyrie who had tracked down her king and guided her ship to Wakanda to join him.  Okoye had seen their reunion, the way they had clung together like the only survivors of a shipwreck.  It was how she had hugged Shuri before hugging Shuri had become impossible because it would have meant Shuri standing still.

“You’ll move on, though,” Okoye said.  “In the end.”

Val gave her a half-smile.  “Would you have me stay, General Okoye?”

T’Challa dead, W’Kabi dead, Queen Ramonda dead…

Yes, she would have Val stay.  But also no, because this was her drink, and it was drink almost too strong for her to handle and still stand upright in the mornings.  In a way, she would be better when Val left and she had nothing and no one.  A sharp-eyed girl queen she could not truly protect and a group of warriors who depended on her strength.  With Val gone, she would have to let herself be hammered out thin and flat as armor, and that would pound the pain out of her head and her heart, that would let her serve and feel nothing.

“I would have you stay for tonight,” Okoye said.

“Stay at camp with me, then,” Val said.  “Save us both the walk.”

“My place is at the palace.”

“And mine is here.”

This was why they never passed the whole night together: it came down each time to this.  Their obligations were too fixed and too separate.  She could not afford to sleep in Val’s arms.

But she could afford a few hours of pleasure, if such bittersweet roughness as they wrung from each other counted as that.

They went to Val’s tent, which wasn’t a tent at all but a kind of cabin made of repurposed shipping materials and bags of sod.  But Val persisted in calling it a tent, as if the word had been too long in her mouth for her to spit it out now.  Okoye wished for a tent, really, for the way the weak starlight would have come through the walls and painted shadows on Val’s skin, beneath her breasts and in the hollow of her throat and between her legs.  She could not scrape the bottom of her defeat.  She always found new things to want and not have.  Yes, it would be better for her if Val and the Asgardians would leave soon.

But they were not leaving tonight.  This was what she had, and she intended to have it until she was sick from the excess.  Val was what she had, and Okoye intended to have her until their knees buckled.

Between the two of them, it was always like a fight where there was no possibility of victory or defeat or even surrender; all they could do was wage wars of attrition against each other’s grief.  They collected souvenirs of battle: the purpling mark on Okoye’s breast in the shape of Val’s mouth, the bruise on the inside of Val’s thigh the match of Okoye’s thumb.  Strained muscles, sore cunts.  Val on her knees with a look on her face like she wanted every last drop of juice from some rare fruit.  The glaze in Okoye’s eyes when she returned to her room that night and looked in the mirror.  Past the shipwreck now, past the survival.

She could see the light of Val’s campfire from her window.  A landmark that would burn out was no real landmark at all, but in these days when anything could fall to ashes, maybe she was wrong about that.  Maybe that was enough for now.


End file.
